The Not-To-Do List: 18 Common Habits You Should Stop Right Away

A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else. | John Burroughs

1. Stop Blaming

When you start blaming,

You start pointing all your mistakes to someone else.

You tend to avoid all the mistakes made by yourself

You start to avoid facing yourself and become a fake you

You will still the same while others are keep growing, including those you point your fingers at

2. Stop Complaining

Life sucks? Trust me, your life isn’t as sucks as you might think, so stop complaining and appreciate life. Complaining about life won’t lead you to a better life, yet wasting your time and energy on that. Instead, take action and make your life better so you get fewer things to complain about in life.

3. Stop Rationalize Things

Do you always hear someone explain a lot to you, just to get you to agree with him on something? Especially on how the other factors cause the failure of themselves in anything, making them “still” look great in front of people despite of their failure.

4. Stop Criticizing Others

If you comment and giving suggestion to that particular person you are criticizing on so that he can improve and grow from mistake and be a better person, go for it. But if you criticize just to criticize, stop it right away. When your job every day is to criticize people, you leave a negative impact on people’s mind, that you will always put a negative mark on people’s head. Instead, change it to be motivating, positive and supporting comment that makes a real impact and help on others.

5. Stop Backstabbing Others

It won’t make either yours or others’ life to be better; it’s just a waste of time with negative energy field around. Believe it or not, people will rather choose to stay away from you and not getting close to you. Why? It is because they won’t know when they’ll be in the backstabbing list of yours and getting lots of negative and mostly one side opinion about them! Nobody loves the feel of being backstabbed by someone else and getting a fake bad name (the problem is, people somehow did believe in what these “backstabber” talking about their negativity).

6. Stop Finding Excuses

Excuses are like the temporary shelter you made for yourself to avoid the rain, it won’t last long and you need to build it, repair it again and again, more and more to cover yourself from more “rain”. We human are relating and connecting to one another, people will surely find out that all you know is getting excuse follow with another excuse without any real capability.

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. | Carl Sandburg

7. Stop Wasting Time

Try analysis your 24 hours of time, does it pass too fast without you able to do anything significant or important? Where had you waste your time? Stop wasting your time on things that does not important and needed at all. Always question yourself this question: “Does it important? Can I skip it or deduct time spent on this, so that I can have more time on other important task?”

Why compare yourself with others? No one in the entire world can do a better job of being you than you. | Unknown

8. Stop Comparing

No one is exactly the same, so stop comparing about how great you are or how weak you are compared with someone else. It will only lead you to egoistic or other way round, de-motivate. Instead of comparing the good and bad, why not learn from each other, or even better team up to produce greater power? Isn’t it awesome?

9. Stop Showing Off

You might feel that bragging about what you got and what you achieve that others don’t is great, but that will only make you feel great, for a while; while others don’t feel any great thing about it, yet dislike it. It is like you do self-promote telling others how great you are, even a tiny bit of an achievement that you are proud of (which might not always looks “WOW” for other people). If your “success story” inspiring others to strive harder in life and achieve more in life, that’s great; but most of the time people loves to showing off just to compare what they got and look down on what others don’t. Is it necessary? Be humble.

10. Stop the Negative Mind

Nothing is perfect in this world. If you pursue perfection, you will never get there; only better and better. So don’t be de-motivate on every tiny thing and be sad. As an example, for negative people, failure means the big stone in front of them that stop them from keeping moving; while positive minded people will treat it as the brick stone building the stairway to success. There’ll never be only one solution to any question or problem in this world; how you treat it is within your own mindset.

The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire not things we fear. | Brian Tracy

11. Stop Living in Your Past

People always looking at their past, remember the past failures, fear and stop moving forward; or proud of the past achievement and keep talking, thinking, bragging about it, and lost the opportunity to build a better present and future. If you stop moving forward, you’re actually moving backward, as time, society, surrounding will keep changing; you will get eliminated very soon. Just learn from the past, and live the best out of your present, for achieving the better future.

12. Stop Thinking Like You Know Everything

Egoistic will lead you to nowhere; it will only set a small square box fitting you inside and fake voice praising how great you are. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know, so don’t stop learning and growing.

13. Stop Telling People What to Do

Even if you are the King or the Queen, you shouldn’t control people’s life, you live yours and they live theirs. Nobody like to be bossed around, I believe the same goes to you. Instead, change it to sharing knowledge and motivate each other would achieve the best result, empowering others while the environment fill with positive charge. Respect others’ life and decision, and they will respect you.

14. Stop the Hatred

Do remember that hatred will only hurt you yourself; it won’t affect people you hate. Let go and forgive, as everyone did mistakes sometimes, no one is perfect. It’s better to have more friends than the enemy, isn’t it?

15. Stop Delay

The only thing matter is NOW, the power of now. Stop dragging things to tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Burden and tasks will get heavier if you get things delay. You could definitely able to imagine (or did experience before) how the delay of flight affect your schedule, miss an important meeting, lost a million dollar contract. Same goes for your life, if you delay things on and on, things will get worse, leaving troubles for the future.

16. Stop Eating LOUD

This seems like a joke, but it annoys people around you lots more than you think. Many people around eating with lots of sound from mouth (you know what I mean), nom nom nom nom… yam yam yam yam… It is so annoying to people around. We are human, but some might claim they’re still consist mostly animal part in them, so eating with so much sound consider reasonable for them. Do control self’s behavior, you might not notice it, but people around will experience it deeply, annoy, lost focus, distract. Please shut your mouth when chewing, you can be better looking in front of girls or even guys with just a little more polite when eating.

17. Stop Checking Social Media Websites Constantly

Perhaps deep inside your heart, you feel great when there’s a new message send to you, as that means you are important to someone out there; or you just love to hang on Facebook, Twitter, keep refreshing your browser hoping to see new content, what your friends talking about the last few minutes, what new videos they shared few seconds ago, stalking people’s profile and new pictures. It’s the biggest distraction in your daily life, and you won’t be able to get many important things done with that with you. After all, it is not your full time job to keep refreshing your browser. :p

18. Stop Checking Mail Constantly

New offers, latest promotion, new article written by blogger send to your mail, junk mail, spam mail, and a little important email. Many people will allow it to pop up on the desktop or ring on mobile device right the next seconds it reached. You will end up open your mailbox for more than 10 times per day, and get distracted every hour. Stay focus and you can achieve more.

P.S. In most of the time, if it is less, it’s fine; but when it comes to many, like complain hundred times a day, checking mails every minute, showing off and looking down on people every single seconds; it become the “disaster” on you.

So what is the Not-to-Do-List of yours?

JJ Wong – Co-founder of Inspiration Boost is passionate in self development & improvement. He loves reading, especially on personal growth, success stories, business related and more. Dedicated in sharing the positive energy to everyone around the world.